The lead intelligence unit of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — long plagued by politicized targeting, permissive rules, and a toxic culture — has undergone a transformation over the last two years. This effort, messaged as a comprehensive “360 review,” involved two phases: a realignment of office structures and an assessment of operational priorities and guidance. The review culminated in a 228-page policy and organizational manual quietly issued in the Biden administration’s waning days to govern the activities of the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). This effort to break from a troubled past is commendable, but it ultimately does little to change the fundamental risk of abuse.
It is past time to end I&A’s ill-defined domestic intelligence activities that operate with neither meaningful safeguards nor robust, objective oversight. Even Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint, calls to shut down the agency. Yet a full fix, which requires an act of Congress, is unlikely in this current environment — as would be the Trump administration’s support for it. But with presidential promises to target critics and crush dissent, the risks posed by I&A are greater than ever.
I&A is known for its targeting of journalists and protestors during 2020 racial justice demonstrations and its assertions that people vandalizing confederate monuments threatened national security. It conducts social media surveillance of Americans talking about abortion, elections, and other “narratives” and grievances — in other words, political talk about hot button issues. The agency disseminates this intelligence to thousands of police nationwide who use it to drive law enforcement decisions.
During the first Trump administration and half of Biden’s presidency, I was an intelligence attorney at DHS, where I advised I&A. Since leaving to join the Brennan Center for Justice, I have chronicled the agency’s ongoing struggles and proposed a plan for fundamental reform. Congress passed legislation that signaled concern but left serious loopholes to exploit what Biden’s DHS intelligence lead called a “vague” mandate.
Following its internal review, I&A has established processes for documenting intelligence activities. While that is a good first step, I&A’s new guidance uniformly validates an expansive view of legal authorities, which continue to permit abuse of counterterrorism and other powers. Indeed, investigations by journalists and civil society have shown that I&A’s reformers spent months targeting environmentalists, portraying them as domestic violent extremists. State authorities relied upon this questionable intelligence to build a politicized RICO indictment – actions more similar to I&A’s 2020 operations in Portland than those of a truly reformed agency. The guidebook offers nothing concrete to protect against future abuse.
Moreover, the Biden administration’s two-year effort illustrates the flimsy nature of discretionary internal reforms like I&A’s. DHS recently removed the guidebook and related documents from its website, likely due to the Trump administration’s new executive order targeting diversity. The policy manual was then reuploaded, stripped of references to terms like “gender,” including a prohibition drawn from constitutional principles on intelligence activities based solely on the trait. Confusion remains as the prohibition still appears in I&A’s publicly available 2017 Attorney General-approved guidelines. The exact impact of these changes remains to be seen, but they show how easily even modest internal reforms can be undone.
New Procedures Useful but Unlikely to Rein in Overbroad Mandates
The primary development in I&A’s new manual is its requirement to document and justify intelligence operations. The actual details of this documentation are withheld from the public in separate “implementation guidance,” significantly undermining the agency’s supposed commitment to transparency. But new procedures require officers to author “reasonable belief statements,” explaining why the information they disseminate outside DHS will further one or more of their national or departmental missions, such as countering “international terrorism” or “threats to critical infrastructure.” Other activities must be justified with “concepts of operations” or “operations proposals” documents.
Yet as my Brennan Center colleague Faiza Patel and I explained, “reasonable belief” is a lax standard that offers significant discretion. At I&A, the term means a “belief based on facts and circumstances such that a reasonable person would hold that belief.” It requires more than hunches and intuitions. Documenting this justification may be helpful, if done well. At the same time, safeguards, such as for constitutionally-protected speech, are also weak.
Indeed, I&A’s 2017 guidelines — which the manual references — fully permit an I&A officer to target, collect, and retain information about the First Amendment-protected activities and speech of Americans if the targeting is believed to further one of many missions. Those include countering domestic terrorism and addressing undefined “significant threats” to “economic security, public health, or public safety.” And for the first time, I&A has identified countering hate crimes as a mission, though the guidance explains little about the legal basis for this newly claimed mandate. Given its history of targeting people who advocate on behalf of marginalized groups, whether I&A should be trusted to do hate crimes work at all is in serious doubt.
Broad missions and lax standards like these permit pretextual targeting. The new guidance notes this risk, appearing to establish a “prohibition on focusing collection on constitutionally protected activities” on social media. But there are serious gaps in this section. First, it says that as a “best practice,” I&A personnel do not “focus their collection efforts on specific U.S. persons.” A “best practice” is not a clear requirement, and the word “focus” is neither defined nor used in this way elsewhere in the 2025 memorandum or 2017 guidelines. It may leave open the door to incidental collection of this activity, or permit pretextual assertions an officer is targeting terrorist plots when political speech is the primary or true focus.
Second, the guidance broadly allows targeting of political views when the person holding them “poses a terrorist or other threat to homeland security,” or is an associate of someone who poses a threat where that associate’s views “will further an understanding of the threat.” Elsewhere the guidance allows collection of information about identified terrorists, as well as vague categories of “vulnerabilities” information and information that somehow “furthers an understanding of terrorism.”
We do not need to speculate about the impact of these lax standards. This sort of thinking has fostered targeting of speech and activity protected by the First Amendment — and of little intelligence value — such as people sharing political “narratives and grievances” or talking about abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Recent intelligence, like a vague I&A report speculating about unrest during the last presidential transition, continues this trend. The report suggested that people being upset about divisive issues like gun and abortion rights, immigration, and the environment could somehow spur on attacks on the U.S. Capitol following Trump’s election. At best, this tells a police audience nothing more than it knows from turning on the news. But it can also drive biased targeting based on junk science.
Questionable Hires
To implement these authorities, I&A brought on two key personnel from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). One was a CIA counterterrorism official — and former Obama national security staffer — selected as principal deputy, who now presumably runs I&A until a Trump appointee arrives. The other, a CIA officer, heads I&A’s collection operations. DHS messaging suggested I&A hired these officials for their seriousness and stellar reputations. But staffing a domestic intelligence unit with officers from an agency known for its history of assault on democratic processes signals, at best, a misunderstanding of years of criticism of I&A.
The person chosen to manage I&A’s relationships with state and local police was formerly the director of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a police agency criticized for originating a gang database with a significant bias problem. Its data has been used for immigration purposes. And under the former director’s leadership, Boston police monitored the social media of thousands of residents, including a city council member critical of its activities and by explicitly targeting political and religious speech – exactly the sort of behavior long plaguing I&A. I&A works closely with “fusion centers” like Boston’s, but further embedding these agencies is likely to exacerbate harms from I&A’s operations with local police.
Weak Oversight Structures
A new internal structure from 2023 resulted in little meaningful change. Most adjustments — like separating intelligence collection and analysis under different senior managers or restructuring how officers in the field report to headquarters — had either been done before or amounted to tinkering that excites bureaucrats but offers little benefit to the public.
The most significant effort promoted the intelligence oversight division within I&A, and the new manual articulates various related processes. Yet it remains subordinate to the officer it is meant to oversee, hardly a promising dynamic for accountability. Moreover, it is one thing for oversight personnel to generate voluminous reports, but these officers need clear rules to enforce. The enduring permissive legal and policy environment undermines their work.
I&A’s policy manual also makes explicit that its oversight office lacks jurisdiction over DHS’s many intelligence programs outside of I&A, such as unchecked Customs and Border Protection initiatives to create dossiers on advocates and clergy and to target journalists. These functions often lack oversight entirely, let alone oversight that is both independent and effective. In a period of controversial immigration and border enforcement policies, those earlier abuses will likely be but a taste of what is to come, with no intelligence oversight specialists to hold officers accountable.
Concerning Priorities Under the Biden Administration and Prospects for Reform
In addition to the hate crimes mandate I&A has asserted, its prior leadership boasted that the agency had sent officers to work out of state and local police agencies along the southwest border. For years, I&A has embedded officers in local intelligence hubs called fusion centers where it can access and collect all sorts of nonfederal data to further its many missions. But preparations since 2023 have put I&A alongside Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to support crackdowns on migrants in the border region. As those operations escalate, I&A is likely to help broker data between local police, DHS, and the intelligence community, interview migrants in coercive detention facilities, and support police with information.
Immigration opponents will appreciate this initiative. But it may mean I&A also contributes to sweeping immigration actions, harsh conditions imposed on migrants, and potential targeting of aid groups, advocates, journalists, and city and state officials. In the past, I&A has hastily deployed personnel to forward operating venues — such as police facilities in Portland, Oregon, during its operations to target racial justice demonstrators. As documented in oversight reviews, those efforts led to internal chaos at the agency and aggressive support for questionable investigations. I&A appears poised to commit these mistakes again.
I&A’s outlook remains troubled. Greater documentation of operations could help the agency move past its history of abuse. But after years of charting a path forward, I&A has ultimately embraced discretionary standards, weak safeguards, and unempowered oversight. And even good procedural checks can be quickly disregarded.
Ultimately, Congress must rein in I&A. Legislators should explore giving other agencies I&A’s useful, less controversial functions — like making certain federal intelligence available to city and state officials and coordinating DHS intelligence activities — while shuttering areas of high risk and little value. Congress should start with I&A’s social media monitoring, which I&A struggles to do effectively while abusing it to target political views or activists; its associated counterterrorism work, often a pretext for similar activities; and its activities in fusion centers and detention environments, which promote abuse of its analysis by local authorities.
Elsewhere, Brennan Center has detailed what a working intelligence oversight program would look like at DHS. Congress should build that into law.
And as the Brennan Center has outlined, there are steps that city and state officials can take to protect their constituents from federal police overreach, such as shutting off access to local immigration, crime, and administrative data, prohibiting the use of local facilities for federal operations, and withdrawing from joint task forces. Many of those steps would also shield against potential abuse of city and state resources by I&A and other intelligence agencies.
Congressional appetite for serious reform often occurs only after significant overreach. As the United States potentially enters one of those periods, our best hope may be to document I&A’s almost inevitable abuse for when that next tipping point arrives.